Yet again I'm surprised by my own deplorable sloth. I've only done one Andy Milligan movie? Seriously? And it was Torture Dungeon? Why not The Ghastly Ones or Guru the Mad Monk? Surely I would start at the outset of Milligan's horror career, or with one of his more famous horror pieces. Well, I'm correcting my sin today by featuring...neither of those movies. Instead, I'm making this week into an unofficial "flesh week" by checking out a Milligan film I only recently discovered. It's not one of his horror films, to boot--it's one of his dramas, much in the same style as his early haunting LGBT short Vapors. In Fleshpot on 42nd Street, Milligan cements himself as a brilliant director and screenwriter, turning in a movie that matches the artsiness of his more respected contemporaries and tells a fascinating story of gender, sex, class, and love...while still keeping things firmly in the gutter, as he's always liked it.
Dusty is a young girl who has shacked up with Tony in his grungy, poorly-lit apartment. She plies him with sex but he keeps pressuring her to get a job. She insists that she has to like a job in order to do it, which I get, but it's pretty clear she really intends to never actually work. Eventually she walks out on him, stealing some of his stuff to sell to pawnbroker Sammy, a clearly gay actor who nonetheless requests a chance to give her really unsatisfactory cunnilingus in return for money. After robbing him, too, she meets up with Cherry, a drag queen friend of hers. This is when Andy gets to strut his stuff--the rest of the movie is nothing but queer bitching, poverty musing, and S&M hooking. And then, Dusty goes through an important moment in every woman's life: she meets Harry Reems. In the end, it wouldn't be Milligan if there wasn't a big fuck-you climax.
I'd be lying if I said this wasn't a slice-of-life film, pure and simple. Milligan channels his inner John Waters, as always, by having the life that's sliced be that of a poor person of questionable repute--a sex worker, and friends with a clique of queer folk. By escaping his normal trappings of Victorian England and high-class mansions, Milligan gets to once more mingle amidst the people he loved the most, and consequently he manages to tone down the hatred in his scripting for genuine attempts at humor and romance. The man was clearly having a rare good day when he put this together. His attempts at nastiness seem almost quota-filling--they're distant and insincere, even Dusty's creepy pro-rape bit about how men "have to stick up for their rights more often" to prevent women from becoming sexless. For once, Milligan has let himself get carried away by the pull of his comfort zone, and his rage hasn't kept him rooted as a stone against the tide this time.
And the film still turns out being well-made. The cheapness still shows: if you check out the Vinegar Syndrome release (which you should), you get to see what it's like when shitty film stock is put as close to HD as possible. You can see every hue of green in those sweet, sweet emulsion scars. But the framing and composition of the film exceeds its technical limitations. There are a lot of really nice looking shots in this movie, with emphasis on shadows and color, with lots of artistic nudity and smoking in bed--the sort of pretentious shit that pretentious people like but which is still captivating in some way. Throw in a snappy script that shoots out zingers like, "We should do it in a bed, like two civilized animals," and you've got a recipe for success.
Andy Milligan always deserves more attention than he gets, and so if you dislike horror movies while also being able to stand some sex, nudity, and crassness in your drama, this is a good entrance point. Vapors is a step to something deeper...and perhaps not as appreciable to The Straights. (The Heterosexuals, I mean.) Like a lot of great directors, there's always more to see with Milligan, more dimensions to his pain. He was famous for his anger, but here's something from when he was a little more happy. At least I think this is happy for him.
If you like the site and want to see more awesome stuff like it, consider becoming my Patron on Patreon!
No comments:
Post a Comment